The Nobel prize winning economist Paul Samuelson once said: "The stock market has forecast nine of the last five recessions." He meant that there have been plenty of times when the economy continued to grow even as the market turned sharply lower.

The stock market crash of 1929 is widely linked to the Great Depression that followed. But the Depression wasn't caused by the market crash alone.

In fact, the "Black Monday" crash on October 19, 1987, when the Dow plunged an unthinkable 22.6% in a day, came when the U.S. economy was growing at a blistering 6.8%. The economy didn't fall into a recession until July 1990, by which time markets had already more than recovered the losses from that day.